For some years I've been thinking about how to use modern machine learning and artificial intelligence in animal training. Most "automated" uses of animal training involve lab animals pressing some buttons, but it should be possible to teach a mouse/rat to visit a particular place in a cage, or hold a certain pose, sniff out something, or a parrot to hum a tune.
But it would also require an algorithm to score "progress" toward a multi dimensional training goal and encode that into binary reward/no reward signals.
ADHD has severe consequences on children: less happiness, less self control, more aggressiveness, higher risk of substance abuse and in general much lower grades.
Unless a new treatment can demonstrate that it can reduce these consequences as well as medication does in the majority of cases, let's stick with the treatment that works, shall we?
In addition, I would like to see more articles about the dangers of misdiagnosis of adhd. There are a lot a conditions that can be mistaken for adhd( sleep disorders to overactive thyroid).
The articles that try to glorify it really annoy me, I can't come up with a single benefit of adhd in my life.
I'd say hyperthyroidism is difficult to overlook. At least I hope nobody is started on long term stimulant treatment without routinely checking simple blood parameters.
Significant number, maybe. Penetration of medical services in these countries has increased quite a lot in the same time span. But, impact of this depends on the type of disease.
Significant increase in breast cancer cases for example is I believe a direct result of increased diagnosis.
But, for the increase in cases of viral diseases, I believe the majority cause is due to things like more dense population, unsanitary conditions and poor infrastructure.
I'd exclude breast cancer because it's detectable with non-medical means before it becomes fatal. I also wasn't speaking so much about medical incidence statistics, but more about perceptions.
Diseases like this are something that forces you go to the doctor, where its gonna gain a diagnosis. With diseases like Zika and Chikungunya the big problem is globalization and air travel.
How is a doctor supposed to diagnose a Virus like Zika without advanced lab tests? The symptoms are non-specific and often non-obvious. In fact, I doubt Zika virus was regularly tested for.
That cannot be allowed to be a thing. Mosquitoes fill an important niche in a great many ecologies. Any society capable of creating such a thing will surely be able to create a vaccine or treatment. That is where energies should be focused.
Eh, from another angle mosquito-killing gene editing (MKGE) is one of the least destructive ways humans can try to kill all mosquitoes.
Killing all mosquitoes isn't a new idea or one that we haven't tried putting into practice. For instance, take a look at satellite photos of Long Island sometime[0]. You see all those straight lines dug along the coasts? That's where we destroyed thousands of acres of marshes for the purpose of killing mosquitoes around New York.
We also led a pretty destructive campaign against them in the American south, as part of essentially eliminating malaria in the United States. Again, countless wetlands destroyed along with spraying some absurd amount of highly effective pesticides like DDT everywhere.
MKGE is like the most environmentally friendly way we've ever tried to kill all mosquitoes.
It sounds like scientists thought about it, decided that their niche would quickly be filled by other insects - "Life would continue as before — or even better":
Go to the north. Wait. Wait until the sky darkens and you are afraid to venture outside. Then say that mosquitoes don't matter. There is some evidence that they consume more caribou, by weight, than the wolves.
I went to grad school with a lot of ecologists (not an ecologist myself). I've seen countless presentations about anthropogenic threats to all kinds of ecosystems. I've never seen anything that included mosquitoes as anything but a disease vector, and I've heard numerous opinions saying that mosquitoes are the one class of animal whose absence would not be noticed by the ecosystem. To back that claim up, I have the micro-review in Nature that I linked above. You can find more sources by following the citation web from it.
Gene drives are certainly a powerful and dangerous technology. But if you want to argue against using a gene drive on mosquitoes from a scientific standpoint, you need to present scientific evidence.
> I've never seen anything that included mosquitoes as anything but a disease vector,
There are entire branches of ecology studying (among other things) the role of mosquitoes in ecosystems. Limnology for example.
> I've heard numerous opinions saying that mosquitoes are the one class of animal whose absence would not be noticed by the ecosystem
Define "numerous"
I can't understand how somebody could claim that nothing will occur if we wipe an entire "class" of animals comprising more than 3000 species and that are linked with almost all in freshwater ecosystems in its quadruple role of prey, predator, pollinisator and vector. Hundred of species of vertebrates of economic interest to man depend on them, probably.
The question is if "Mosquitoes fill an important niche in a great many ecologies".
The Nature article that ak217 linked to describes the north as the primary special case: "Taken all together, then, mosquitoes would be missed in the Arctic — but is the same true elsewhere?"
Otherwise, they don't seem to have a key niche, eg, as a food source for insect-eaters.
> Ultimately, there seem to be few things that mosquitoes do that other organisms can't do just as well — except perhaps for one. They are lethally efficient at sucking blood from one individual and mainlining it into another, providing an ideal route for the spread of pathogenic microbes.
It ends with a quote:
> "They don't occupy an unassailable niche in the environment," says entomologist Joe Conlon, of the American Mosquito Control Association in Jacksonville, Florida. "If we eradicated them tomorrow, the ecosystems where they are active will hiccup and then get on with life. Something better or worse would take over."
Thus, the article argues that mosquitoes do not fill an important niche in a great many ecologies, though they definitely fill an important niche in the arctic.
> Many species of insect, spider, salamander, lizard and frog would also lose a primary food source. In one study published last month, researchers tracked insect-eating house martins at a park in Camargue, France, after the area was sprayed with a microbial mosquito-control agent1. They found that the birds produced on average two chicks per nest after spraying, compared with three for birds at control sites.
> Most mosquito-eating birds would probably switch to other insects that, post-mosquitoes, might emerge in large numbers to take their place. Other insectivores might not miss them at all: bats feed mostly on moths, and less than 2% of their gut content is mosquitoes. "If you're expending energy," says medical entomologist Janet McAllister of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Fort Collins, Colorado, "are you going to eat the 22-ounce filet-mignon moth or the 6-ounce hamburger mosquito?"
> With many options on the menu, it seems that most insect-eaters would not go hungry in a mosquito-free world. There is not enough evidence of ecosystem disruption here to give the eradicators pause for thought.
I don't believe they do, because the death rates just aren't that high. Population-limiting factors for Humans have historically been mostly food supply and childhood diseases. I've heard that Malaria wasn't so much of a problem until people where driven into malaria-infested areas due to population growth.
Today the population limiting factor for Humans seems to be women's education. No kidding, this seems to be the number one factor in birth-rates. The more education women are getting the less babies are born. And I am generally in favor of both, more education and less procreation.
If you love what you do, you'll never work an hour in your life. So maybe academics shouldn't work at all, since the compensation isn't worth doing something you don't love ;-)
That's absurd. No matter how much I love what I do, spending more than a certain amount of time at it makes me tired. Tired me makes mistakes that fresh me has to fix. Tired me produces less overall output for the same amount of effort put in. If what I want is to maximise output, stopping to rest is the only rational choice.
Also, the implicit assumption is that, if you love what you do, you don't love doing anything else. I want time to devote to activities other than the work I so love. Much of that time can and does end up producing useful cross-pollination with my day job, but that's just gravy.
Not quite true. I love what I do, but what I do is really hard work. It is such excruciatingly hard work thay it slowly rips out my sanity.
I can imagine this is the same for academics.
Plus a lot of the job are things that they hate doing - politics, fundraising, dealing with hopeless students, writing modules that never get used. Many of them spend all their time doing these things, and the "overtime" is necessary to get the real work done after all that.
Retroviruses were the major showstopper, now they can identify them and remove them from the genome. Maybe they run into another roadblock, but... Maybe it works this time.
One point of MOOCs is that they are not text books. That does not mean text books are bad or that MOOCs are all you'll ever want.
Some MOOCs create video content totally "from scratch", but usually they build on the lecturers' ability to hold a lecture in the topic, often honed through years of repeated lecturing on the same topic.
I'd also like to recommend the novel series "The Expanse". While not entirely accurate, at least the start of the series deals with a lot of the near-future limits in space travel: lack of gravity and the consequences thereof for humans, acceleration, radiation etc.
And in the new TV-Adaptation there are fascinating little details like sparrows flying/hovering in 0.3G inside a tunnel inside an Asteroid (Ceres) with an artificially induced spin.
Well, preventing Cancer has been a priority for evolution since the first multicellular organisms arose. It's just not that easy.
Developing a drug is an economically difficult thing: Spend billions for the chance to win billions. The only alternatives to big pharma in developing these drugs are big government and big charity (Gates' Foundation et al).
Well, preventing Cancer has been a priority for evolution since the first multicellular organisms arose
It's only a "priority for evolution" to prevent cancer before the better years for breeding have passed - and evolution has done a fairly good job with that. After breeding and a little time for rearing young in the higher life forms, evolution has no real use for us.
There is no cancer which affects "the old" predominantly. The chances stay pretty much the same (with some exceptions). Also, at some age beyond 60, cancer stops being the main medical cause of death, being replaced by infections.
I also don't subscribe to the theory that individuals have to procreate to boost the survival of their genes. In reality it's a bit more complex than that, and even very old people can and do contribute to the survival of their children or their close relatives.
> In reality it's a bit more complex than that, and even very old people can and do contribute to the survival of their children or their close relatives.
That's true for human beings. But for most species that is not true. Maybe that's why we are better at longevity than other species (http://www.medcan.com/articles/a_finite_number_of_heart_beat...).
But we still have millions of years of evolution that say that it is better to be able to live short and intense than to be able to live long and die before achieving that of disease, predators, etc. Why nature will invest in an extreme long lifespan that is not going to happen?
So for most species what happens to you as you grow old is not very important and other traits will be selected before lifespan by evolution.
I would not subscribe to the statement about what "the evolution says". Evolution does not produce the "best" individuals, it just drives population towards a local maximum in their particular environment, from their particular starting point. And that may mean a long life span or a short life span.
The obvious solution is probably the best: Use an asynchronous framework (like node.js or asyncio) for the REST interface and wait for the completion of the task to return a response.
That process wouldn't handle all the details of the task, but it can wait for notification of the task via other means (celery, rabbitmq, redis, whatever...).
Personally I think REST is the best paradigm for most microservices. There is one exception: Data streams are inherently stateful and some kind of websocket/message passing is a lot more useful in that case.
Aren't your requests going to be greater than the MTU anyways? Might as well send it whenever unless the work resulting from request processing can also be processed- which sounds like an application protocol.
But it would also require an algorithm to score "progress" toward a multi dimensional training goal and encode that into binary reward/no reward signals.